News

Should all .NET Collections Implement all .NET Collection Interfaces? That was the first of several important API questions asked in the .NET Core API Review for January the 14th. This video contains a recording of the discussions about ten change requests for the .NET’s base class library.

The latest preview of Visual Studio 2015 demonstrates new diagnostic and debugging tools along with a new release of TypeScript. An updated build of ASP.NET 5 is also included, broadening its developer tools.

A lot of small releases were made by Microsoft’s SQL Server team last month. Some of the highlights include Power BI for on-site servers, System Center support for SQL Server 2014, and updated Java/PHP drivers.

AutoMapper, .NET’s most popular object-to-object mapping library, has been updated with a large set of new features including support for open generics and callbacks. AutoMapper 3.3 is expected to the final version in the 3.x series.

You can tell a lot about the future of a UI toolkit by how the third party control vendors are treating it. Since their revenue is based around correctly predicting what developers are going to be using in the near future, they spend a lot of time and effort researching the topic. In this report, we’ll be looking at DevExpress and their treatment of WinForms and Silverlight.

Whether it is due to the advent of the cloud or simply a desire to see if it is a better business model, software licensing has been moving towards a subscription-based system. In an effort to better attract customers, Microsoft has announced several pricing changes to Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server that should lower monthly project costs.

Version 7 of Entity Framework represents a major redesign of the 6-year-old ORM. As such, Microsoft will not be recommending the initial release of EF 7 for existing projects. Rather, it is only meant for projects that are using ASP.NET 5 and .NET Core.

While many applications are now being sold through app stores, mid-sized and big-ticket software is still offered directly to customers via web sites. For these kinds of projects, out-of-band licensing is still a major concern. One way to manage licenses is via serial keys using libraries such as SKGL.

When a database administrators think of high performance data loading, they are thinking of bulk operations, a feature noticeably lacking in Entity Framework. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We recently spoke with Jonathan Magnan of ZZZ Projects about their new offerings.

Microsoft announced at connect() that .NET Core would be open sourced and it would provide a single code base to support all platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. Recently, Immo Landwerth, Program Manager at Microsoft, has given more details about what .NET Core is and how it will provide "the foundation for all future .NET platforms."

JetBrains has announced new RTM versions for their .NET tools, including ReSharper 9, dotTrace 6, dotCover 3, dotMemory 4.2, dotPeek 1.3 and TeamCity Add-in 9.0. JetBrains has created a single installer and platform for these tools. When attempting to install ReSharper, developers are presented with the option to install other .NET tools which will share the platform.

Unity developers using Visual Studio will see several improved debugging features in the latest preview of Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0. Alongside the enhancements is added support for VS2015 and Visual Studio 2013 Community.

The .NET Foundation Advisory Council has extended the community feedback period to Friday, December 5th. After the fifth, the Foundation will begin to officially form next year’s council. You can read more about the Advisory Council, propose changes, and discuss nominations on the .NET Foundation Forum.